Tips & Tricks

Although the iPhone has been able to take still photos while recording videos for a while now, you have to think about it at the time. The good news, though, is that if you’ve ever found yourself wanting to grab a still image from one of your iPhone videos after the fact, it’s actually pretty easy to do this using the macOS Photos app.

When Apple introduced Family Sharing in iOS 8, we mostly welcomed it as a great solution for those families trying to figure out the best way to share iTunes and App Store purchases among multiple family members. The new feature is especially useful for families with children, as each can have their own iCloud, iTunes, and App Store accounts, with their own passwords and preferences and purchasing capabilities that must be approved by the parent. However, one thing we ran into very early on with the new Family Sharing feature was that Apple didn’t appear to provide any means to convert an existing account into a child account. Let’s face it, until Family Sharing came along with its support for Children’s Accounts, the only way to create an Apple ID for a child under the age of 13 was to fudge the child’s birthday, and there are undoubtedly more than a few folks who took that approach just to make sure that their children could have their own parentally-supervised Apple IDs.

Of course, it seems that Apple has been tacitly aware of this all along as well, and although there are no obvious support articles or other instructions to walk you through the process, Apple has provided a loophole by which you can “come clean” and convert your children’s “teenage” Apple IDs into proper “Children’s Accounts” without having to set up entirely new Apple IDs for them. To start the process, first ensure that your child’s Apple IDs has been added to Family Sharing, and then log in to your child’s Apple ID on the web at appleid.apple.com and edit their account information to enter their correct birthday. As soon as you enter a birthday that places them under 13 years of age, you’ll get a prompt alerting you that parental consent is required, that this process will convert the account into a “children’s account” and an e-mail request will be sent to the family organizer.

Keep in mind that as the warning prompt suggests, this process is irreversible, and the account will be permanently converted to a children’s account until the child reaches 13, based on the new date of birth that you’ve entered. It’s also important to mention here that once you’ve completed this process, you won’t be able to change the date of birth without contacting Apple support, so double-check to make sure you’ve entered it correctly before continuing. Clicking “Continue” will send an email to the family organizer (which should be you in this scenario), although until it’s been approved, the request can still be cancelled.

An e-mail should appear in your inbox shortly asking for your approval to update your child’s birthdate and change their account into a children’s account.

Clicking the “Approve Request” button will take you to the Apple ID sign-in page in your web browser of choice, and once you’ve signed in you’ll be shown the birthday change (where you’ll have another chance to correct it if needed) and a Parent Privacy Disclosure and will need to confirm the change by entering the security code from whichever credit card is assigned to the primary payment method for your family; the payment verification method is more or less the same procedure required to set up a children’s account from scratch, as detailed in Apple’s knowledgeable article on Family Sharing and Apple ID for your child.

Once you’ve approved the request, your child’s date of birth will be updated and their Apple ID will be irrevocably converted to a children’s account and associated with your family. Children’s accounts must be associated with a family until they’re 13 years of age, however Apple has provided a way to transfer children’s accounts between families should you ever need to do so.

Anybody who has ever lost contact or calendar items will appreciate a new feature that Apple has quietly added to iCloud. You can now restore individual iCloud Drive files or roll back to a previous set of contact or calendar data by logging into the iCloud web portal at www.icloud.com, selecting Settings and scrolling down to the “Advanced” section at the bottom.

The “Restore Files” option will allow you to restore any file deleted from iCloud Drive in the past 30 days. Each file is shown individually with the number of days remaining before it is permanently deleted. “Restore Contacts” and “Restore Calendars,” on the other hand, allow you to simply roll back entirely to a previous data set — there unfortunately isn’t any way to retrieve a specific individual contact record or calendar event. In fact, as the warnings on the “Restore Calendars” screen indicates, restoring to a previous calendar set will remove all sharing information, and cancel and re-send all shared appointment invitations, so the setting should be used with some caution. Mac users are likely far better off using Time Machine to restore lost Calendar or Contact dates. However, the iCloud options are useful as a last resort if no other backups are available.

If you’re looking for a single lost contact record, calendar event, or reminder, and have no other backups available, one workaround is to export your current contact or calendar data using the appropriate app. The iCloud Contacts web app allows vCards to be exported from its Settings menu (the gear icon in the bottom right), and you can export a single VCF file containing all of your contacts by selecting all of them before using the export option. For Calendar export, Mac users can use the native OS X Calendar app, while Windows users will have to resort to syncing data via Outlook or Windows Calendar. Once you’ve backed up your current data, you can then use the iCloud rollback to restore the previous data set and then reimport your contact and calendar data to merge it with the restored information.